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Bodies of water -- oceans, lakes, pools, puddles -- ripple with potential metaphors.
And Catherine McCall, apparently, has yet to meet one that doesn't float her boat.
"We were five people rowing a tiny lifeboat," McCall writes, recalling the troubled parents and siblings who, along with competitive swimming, shaped her childhood in Kentucky.
"Mom was paddling and steering and bailing the water that was seeping into the too small boat.
"Dad was creating a wake, a drag, falling out, sinking -- he was taking on water for all of us, and as a family, we were drowning."
I could go on, and McCall does.
Lifeguarding, her account of coming of age and coming to terms with both her family's peccadilloes and her own sexuality, teems with elaborate and sometimes strained imagery, and not just of an aquatic nature. A practicing psychiatrist, McCall also has a tendency to interrupt her narrative with protracted analyses of the various players.
Each chapter of this first book begins with an instruction or admonition from the manual American Red Cross Lifeguarding, carefully selected to further highlight already underlined problems and lesson plans.
But McCall's is a charming debut in spite of its stilted and self-conscious elements -- or perhaps, in part, because of them.
The contributor to The New York Times and other publications has a master's degree in creative nonfiction and is capable of elegant prose when she doesn't let her urge to dramatize and deconstruct get the better of her.
More important, though, Lifeguarding strives for an emotional authenticity.
At a time when best-selling authors are rewarded for shameless and sometimes snarky self-promotion, there's something refreshing and endearing about McCall's thoughtful attention to context and the earnest compassion with which she addresses everything from her father's alcoholism to her mother's reluctance to accept McCall's homosexuality.
McCall's early romances, too, are relayed with a combination of generosity and wonder rare in today's jaded, judgmental media climate.
Or as McCall might have put it: Wade through Lifeguarding's excesses, and you'll find a steady stream of gentler, deeper waters.
Lifeguarding: A Memoir
of Secrets, Swimming
and the South
By Catherine McCall
Harmony, 272 pp., $23
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